Connie L. Van Huis

They say you can tell what your passion is with one question. What is it that makes you feel most alive? Well, there are two things that make me feel alive. 1) Anything horse-related and 2) teaching the Bible and helping people know God. Talking to horse people is so easy. I have never met a person who owns horses who doesn’t have a bunch of stories, and once you get them talking, they entertain you, and you can entertain them. You can pick up buying, feeding, grooming, and training tips from horsey conversations. Horses do crazy, unbelievable, amazing things, and people who own them and ride them and train them have a life full of joys and frustrations to share. It’s never boring. Not only is the Bible full of stories of people doing crazy, unbelievable, amazing things, but it also clearly tells us what God is like. Yet somehow, people have managed to bore other people with it. I don’t think that should ever happen. One way I’ve tried to counter that is to put my horse stories to work to make the Bible come alive and really mean something to people. Life is hard. Life without God is harder. Going through life not understanding the character of God makes a person suspicious of him. You can’t love who you don’t know. You also can’t love someone you don’t respect. When I teach or write, that’s what I’m up to: helping people know God so they can love and respect him. He gave me my love of horses, and that’s what I can use to teach and write.

God gave me a leg up for teaching by giving me a mom and dad who were truly believers. None of that fluffy stuff for them, they said. They weren’t well off and had stories of how God got them through tough times. It wasn’t church for us, it was God’s house. I grew up with healthy respect for God and a whole lot of sound, Biblical teaching. Someday, I’ll stand before God and have to give account for all the teaching I’ve received. Will I have used properly what he gave me? That’s what makes me teach and write. The Bible says to whom much is given, much will be required.

I have a great family of my own, now. My husband has many hobbies that center around motorsports. He has done some demolition derbies, off-road racing, enduro racing, circle track racing, drag racing, and all the while Jeeps have been his go-to passion. He’s always building something. Our family loves trail-riding in Jeeps, and we have a sand dune area close to us that has an Offroad Vehicle Park. My daughter loves horses and is a writer. My sons like to downhill ski, were into dirt bikes and motocross racing, and now there’s just a lot of four-wheel-drive trucks around here. I am like the nucleus around home: gardening and canning and making meals and lunches and just generally making sure everyone has the easiest time possible getting where they have to go. I taught Sunday school and was involved in youth group and Wednesday night Bible lessons for many years. We homeschooled the kids, and I learned about as much as they did! We did 4-H showmanship and agility with a dog one summer and equestrian team another year. We have a lot of trails in the woods around here to maintain and mow. And there’s forever the slow remodeling of our house. That’s life here in a nutshell: always something going on.

I think I whined about having horse from the time I was able to talk. My mom grew up with work horses on a farm, and she was scared of them. Also, it takes a fair amount of money to have an animal that eats so much and needs other care to maintain (vet and farrier), and doesn’t contribute to the table or freezer. So when I was three, they bought me a baby goat, and I named her Black Arrow. We got a little goat herd going and that was fun and all, but I still wanted a horse to ride. Luckily, my neighbor won a pony in a poker game, and since she was too little for them to ride, I got my wish. She had a surprise baby in the spring, and I got to help with bringing him up. I raised a beef cow for 4H, but didn’t show him at fair because I didn’t spend enough time with him to make him lead very well. We got him in the fall and winter came early that year, and by spring he was a pretty big fellow to try to persuade. We took him to an auction and Mom and Dad let me buy a horse out of the proceeds. I bought a ¾ Arab weanling, raised him, trained him, broke him in, and sold him when I went to college. It wasn’t until years later that my husband and I ended up buying a place that had enough land so I could have horses again.

I wouldn’t call what we did horse training; it really was more like foster care. We were always looking for that “keeper”. You know--the horse that is so cool and so awesome that you’d never sell him. Of course, that horse doesn’t exist, or at least no one else is selling him, either. So you have to start at a point where the horse is and bring him up to where you want him to be. That right there should have been enough to have me taking notes all along. Isn’t that what God does with us--start with us where we are and bring us along to where he wants us to be? And so the analogies begin. All we wanted was the perfect horse and we had training methods to get him there. All God wants is saints, and he has his ways of getting us there. The Bible is his training philosophies all written and collected in one place.

That right there is the origins of "Stable Help: What My Horses Helped Me Understand About God".